Developing SoTL Research Questions

Nancy Chick’s guide provides practical tips for choosing a "problem" to investigate as a means to develop a SoTL research question. She walks through key logistical considerations and offers two examples of SoTL projects.

This resource summarizes four types of SoTL inquiry questions based on the work of Pat Hutchings (2000)—“What works,” “What is,” “Visions of the possible,” and “Formulating new conceptual frameworks”—and includes a video of Dr. Hutchings describing the Taxonomy of Questions and a video of example SoTL projects.

In this scholarly article, Pat Hutchings describes in detail an approach to characterize SoTL work using a taxonomy of questions summarized in the resource, “Asking Inquiry Questions.” The framework is grounded in case studies from eight Carnegie Scholars with the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

An important first step in conducting your own SoTL project is identifying your research question(s): what you want to know about teaching and learning. This worksheet, developed for the University of Virginia’s SoTL Scholars program, will help you develop your own SoTL research questions.